[tz] [PROPOSED PATCH 2/2] Use lz format for new tarball

[Paul Eggert]

Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:

> It is indeed an easy thing to add, and it has been requested a couple
> times[1][2], but Igor Pavlov does not consider it a priority.

If it's that easy to add, perhaps you could do that and send in a patch. Even if 
it's low priority for the maintainer, if the code and documentation are already 
written it shouldn't be hard for the maintainer to install a patch. This would 
help encourage the use of lz format.

> I would consider bzip2 the second best choice; it decompresses safely on all platforms at the only cost of an unimportant increase in tarball size. IMO gzip is also fine. Xz is the only format that I consider should be avoided.

bzip2 is about 11% bigger than lzip for our purposes, though. The .bz2 combined 
file is bigger than the gzipped data file, which is a downer:

   $ ls -l tz*.tar.*z*
   -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 202609 Aug 30 14:00 tzcode2016X.tar.gz
   -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 394169 Aug 30 14:00 tzdata2016X.tar.gz
   -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 426667 Aug 30 14:10 tzdb-2016X.tar.bz2
   -rw-r--r-- 1 eggert eggert 382991 Aug 30 14:00 tzdb-2016X.tar.lz

As there are multiple free MS-Windows-based utilities that can decompress lzip 
format, I guess we can ask our MS-Windows users to use one. They can continue to 
use the existing gzip-based tarballs as well, since they will be distributed for 
a while.

So, I'm inclined to go back to .lz format despite the lack of current 7-Zip 
support, as in the attached proposed tz patch.
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